War and Peace Memorial Park and Theme Hall

The War and Peace Memorial Park and Theme Hall (戰爭與和平紀念公園主題館) stands on Cijin Island in Kaohsiung Harbor, the last piece of Taiwan that departing soldiers saw as their troop ships sailed away during World War II. The park commemorates the complex and tragic history of Taiwanese men conscripted to serve under multiple flags during the 20th century.

Between 1937 and 1945, a total of 207,183 Taiwanese were recruited by the Imperial Japanese military — 126,750 as civilian employees (軍屬・軍夫) and 80,433 as soldiers and sailors. Of these, 30,304 were killed or declared missing in action across the Pacific theatre: the Philippines, Burma, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and Okinawa. After Japan's surrender, surviving Taiwanese veterans received neither Japanese nor Chinese government pensions or compensation, falling into a legal limbo between two regimes.

After 1945, thousands of former Japanese servicemen were re-conscripted by the ROC Nationalist government and sent to fight in the Chinese Civil War and later the Korean War. Those who refused or were suspected of disloyalty faced persecution during the White Terror era. The Taiwanese veteran experience thus spans service under the Japanese Rising Sun flag, the ROC Blue Sky with White Sun flag, and in some cases the PRC Red Flag — a uniquely painful legacy.

The driving force behind the memorial was Hsu Chao-jung (許昭榮, 1928–2008), a native of Pingtung who joined the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1943, in his mid-teens, as a special volunteer. After the 228 Incident of 1947 he was recruited into the ROC Navy as a technician and sent to the Chinese mainland. Arrested in 1958 in a Taiwan-independence case during the White Terror, he was sentenced to 10 years and held on Green Island and elsewhere until 1968. Upon release, Hsu devoted his remaining decades to documenting the stories of Taiwanese veterans and campaigning for an official memorial.

In 1997, Hsu began petitioning local governments for a memorial site. After years of lobbying, a site was chosen on the Cijin coast: a first memorial stone was unveiled in October 2000, and the Monument to the Unknown Taiwanese Soldiers and the park itself followed in 2004–05. On 13 March 2008 the Kaohsiung City Council resolved to rename it simply "Peace Memorial Park". On 20 May 2008, in protest at the renaming and at what his final note called the neglect of Taiwan's war dead by both major parties, Hsu set himself on fire in a car in front of the monument and died.

The park's Theme Hall opened exactly one year later, on 20 May 2009, together with a monument to Taiwan's war dead of all eras. The park consists of a memorial stele (紀念碑), the Heart Echo Square (心迴廣場), an observatory overlooking the harbor, and the Theme Hall museum, which houses historical photographs, personal artifacts, military equipment, and textual displays documenting the wartime experiences of Taiwanese soldiers. A memorial dedicated to the Hellships tragedy — the January 1945 bombing of the Enoura Maru in Kaohsiung Harbor, killing approximately 300 Allied POWs — is also located within the park.

The Theme Hall's central exhibit features a life-size image of a Taiwanese man wearing the uniforms of three different armies — Japanese, ROC, and PRC — symbolizing the impossible predicament of colonial-era Taiwanese who served under shifting imperial powers. The Theme Hall is described as the only facility in Taiwan that commemorates together the Taiwanese who served in the Japanese, ROC and PLA forces.